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He is also a storyteller albeit a visual storyteller–he’s in advertising. One of his favorite pastimes is to scour the web for a brilliant ad or guerrilla marketing campaign. Invariably he’ll send me the link to his favorites and we’ll have a great time discussing why that particular campaign works. He was one of the first to find the little boy Darth Vader Volkswagen commercial.
Brilliant. I still watch that commercial when I need a smile for my heart. Once I had a little boy who dreamed of being a superhero with special powers.

Recently my son, who actually grew into a super hero (at least to his mother), told me about a campaign he’d heard about, to save the library system in Troy, MI. Now, this doesn’t have the cachet that would normally garner a particular 28 year-old-male’s attention, so I figured it must be good.

I was researching my latest book, when I stumbled across something scary — “gas lighting.”

If you aren’t familiar with the term it comes from a 1944 MGM movie called Gaslight. In it Ingrid Bergman is being “gaslighted” by her husband played by Charles Boyer. Her husband wants her expensive jewelry. In order to get it and get rid of her, he makes the gas lights flicker when he is out of the house. When she tells him about it, he accuses of her overreacting, of imagining it, of being…crazy.

While gaslighting is fun to use in a book, what is scary is that the technique is so common that psychatrists now use it to describe certain relationships. These are usually male/female in which one mentally abuses the other. Apparently it is quite common.

One partner, usually the male, gives false information to the female to make her doubt her own reality. She feels him pulling away. He assures her she is imagining things. She sees him being overly friendly with another woman and asks about it. He says she is overreacting, that she’s too sensitive, that she’s…crazy.

Last week I was contacted by two people I know to ask questions about how they can move forward in the world of publishing. The first was a fifteen-year-old friend of my daughter. She and I have talked several times about the business side of writing, but last week she told me she was up to 80K words in her fantasy novel and hoped to have it finished by the end of the summer. Her question was, “What’s my next step?”

By then Mom was used to such requests. Already she’d caved in to my pleas for a diary that locked with a key, a heart-shaped locket, an iron-on monogram with my initials for my pink button-down shirt, and a shrunken head.

Okay, really it was a carved coconut made to look like an man in the last throes of fear of being eaten by an anaconda. I guess that explains all the nightmares and my bloodcurdling screams.

(And why, finally, Mom buried the head in the back yard– something I would never have known if my trusty Doberman sidekick, Kazan, hadn’t dug it up and trotted it back over to me. It was Mom who screamed then, when she saw it back in its usual place: on my bookshelf, next to the rabbit’s foot.

I guess that foot was lucky after all — for the coconut, anyway.

Which brings me to the topic of luck, specifically as it pertains to writing.

I know a lot of novelists who are excellent writers. Their stories are compelling, but for some reason they haven’t connected with the zeitgeist that will give them the traction that would make them the next Nora (Roberts)/ Danielle (Steel)/ Dan (Brown)/ John (Grisham)/ Stieg (Larsson) / JK (Rowling)/whomever-is-the-author-flavor-of-the-year. Maybe they weren’t in sync with an agent willing to stick it out with them while they tried to claw their way out of the mid-list. Or maybe what the author is writing books that editors aren’t buying right now, because that genre is “over-saturated” because these same editors bought too much of a trend in which readers have OD’d on.

Yet another reason to forgo the trends, and write what resonates with YOU.

Believe in your story.

Believe in your voice.

Believe in your ability to find the right mentors (critique partners) and professional champions (agent, editor) to help you get it in the hands of readers who will appreciate it, and want even more from you.

Yes, you know where this is leading: BELIEVE IN YOURSELF.

Only you can write that book.

Only you can sell that book.

Only you can give you the career you want.

So toss that supposedly lucky penny you found on the sidewalk, the fortune from the Chinese takeout box, and that parsley sprig you insist is a four-leaf clover, because none of these will get you what you want: your name on the spine of a book.

When the stars do align for you, it’s because you’re in the right place, with the right book.

Case in Point: Just this past week, MSW author, Karin Tabke was honored with Romantic Time’s Reviewer’s Choice Award for Best Romantic Fiction for her book, Blood Law.

Hell yeah, she deserved it.

If I were to be objective about the karma surrounding that rabbit’s foot, I guess I’d say it wasn’t really all that lucky at all. My grades didn’t improve. My hair stayed coiled in a frizz ball. And I was still taller than all the boys in my class. Except for Bob Butler, which is why we were always partnered for square dances.

(For your sake, Bob, I’m hope you kept growing. As for me, I was happy to top out at at five-foot six inches, in the seventh grade and let the rest of the class catch up.)

The rabbit’s foot is long gone. And thank goodness The Hub looks nothing like the coconut head, albeit sometimes I wish I knew right voodoo curse that could turn him into a bug-eyed pinhead when he acts like one. In the meantime, I’ll stay away from Vegas slot machines and Golden Gate Fields…

Feeling lucky? If so, play this little game with me! It’s called “Lucky 7.” Here’s how it works: I”ve posted the scene starting on page 77 of THE HOUSEWIFE ASSASSIN’S HANDBOOK, here. For a chance to win this digital eBook, email me at MailFromJosie@gmail.com with the correct answer to the question at the end of the post (worth 7 points). The winner will be chosen from the correct answers received by Midnight PT on Friday, April 20, 2012.

Earn a Bonus Point for commenting here below, about your good luck charm, or by congratulating Karin on her win.

One of the things I love about the Murder She Writes authors is that the women they write about are strong and self sufficient. I’m guess that my own skewed vision of “the damsel in distress” may have been irrevocably altered by a lifetime love of James Bond movies.

It’s been over half a century now since the very first Bond Girl — Honey Ryder, played by Ursula Andress in a white belted bikini accessorized with an assassin’s blade — graced the silver screen and launched a million erections. Sauntering in from the surf just in time for the Sexual Revolution, Bond Girls weren’t considered sexist, but sexy.

But these women were much more than arm charms. When they were good, they were great: not just in bed, but in the field, too. And when they were bad, they weren’t just naughty minxes, but deadly villianesses as well.

Have a great Bond Girl name?
Post it below, for a chance to win a copy of my bookTHE BABY PLANNER.

BONUS POINT!

When writing The Housewife Assassin’s Handbook, I considered giving my heroine a name worthy of a Bond Girl. But because the series is also a tip of the chapeau to
television’s domestic goddesses of the 1950s,
I chose the name Donna Stone.”

Email me at MailFromJosie@gmail.com
with the television show that also had a heroine by that name!

Featured on murder she writes

Bio:

Allison Brennan

Allison Brennan is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nearly three dozen romantic thrillers and mysteries, including the Lucy Kincaid series and the Max Revere series. She lives in Northern California with her husband, five children, and assorted pets.